America’s modern involvement with the issue of aliens (people living in the US who are not citizens) traces back to the 1940 Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act. The act required that each alien living within the US go to their local post office and register their alien status with the government. The registration process included a questionnaire form and a requirement that fingerprints be taken. Each non-citizen would be issued an ‘A’ number.
This act also made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government.
At the end of 1940 there were approximately 650,000 Italian aliens, 300,000 German aliens and 50,000 Japanese aliens resident in the country. With President Roosevelt’s declaration of war on December 8, and his Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527, all German, Italian, and Japanese aliens over the age of 14 were now deemed “enemy aliens” who were required to register and carry certificates of identification.1
The president also signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted the Army to exclude not just enemy aliens but “any and all persons” from designated critical areas on the West Coast. Eventually, that same Executive Order led to the “relocation” of all persons of Japanese ancestry, including those who were citizens.
During the 1940s, Americans enjoyed dozens of spy movies, several by famous directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Radio dramas played on the same theme as did propaganda campaigns, the most well-known being “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” The idea of a fifth column at work on the home front was never far from mind.
Though not well known, the United States, based on hemispheric security, offered to intern allegedly dangerous enemy aliens living in Latin American countries and even recommended which enemy aliens should be interned. Several Latin American countries accepted the offer and eventually deported more than 6000 individuals of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry, along with some of their families, to the US for internment.
31,275 enemy aliens were imprisoned in Justice Department camps under the provisions of the Alien Enemies Act during World War II: 10,905 Germans, 16,845 Japanese, and 3278 Italians. In early 1942 thousands more – Germans, Italians and particularly Japanese – were excluded from military zones and interred. 7000 Germans and Italians living on the West Coast were moved inland.2
A special interment occurred for 800 Native American Alaskans. In an effort to remove them from a war zone in the Aleutians, the government resettled them in camps 2000 miles away near Juneau. Conditions were by all accounts poor. Their internment ended with the war.
Freedoms were sacrificed in the name of national security. Professions were interrupted or lost, property and businesses were forfeited, and families were torn apart.
The famous among them included Italian opera star, Ezio Pinza, who was detained for months as was Giuseppe DiMaggio, father of baseball’s DiMaggio brothers. The elder DiMaggio, a fisherman in California, had failed to register. He became subject to travel restrictions and a curfew. Barred from his family’s restaurant, he was even prohibited from boarding his boat and fishing.
By late 1942 however, the government had dropped serious discussion of the mass relocation or detention of unnaturalized Germans or Italians. The move would have been impractical, and officials decided that these enemy aliens did not pose a significant security threat.
The US Attorney General removed Italians from the enemy alien list on Columbus Day, just before the 1942 elections. Critics pointed to Roosevelt’s need for the very large Italian American vote for the Democrats.3
In August 1944 a ship carrying 983 Jewish refugees who had managed to escape from Germany and get to the allied lines in Italy docked in New York. Because they were here outside immigration quotas, they were taken to a refugee camp in upstate New York. The camp was not unlike an Army stockade.4
The issue of the Japanese in America was quite different. Americans knew and grew up with Italian and German Americans as both citizens and aliens. On the home front people talked about “good Germans” and “good Italians.” They looked like any American and were hard to single out, though incidents did occur. The sentiment toward Japanese was never positive but after Pearl Harbor feelings became passionate with hatred.
Most of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the mainland lived along the Pacific Coast. The large majority, perhaps 75,000, were full citizens, born and raised in the United States. After the Pearl Harbor attack, however, Americans on the home front became suspicious and fearful of all Japanese. No doubt racial motives played a role in their feelings, particularly on the West Coast where anti-Asian feelings resided ever since Chinese workers arrived to work on the railroads.
American sentiment, fears of sabotage, and news of Japanese victories in the Pacific as well as strong pressure from military leaders led Washington to adopt a drastic policy toward these residents, alien and citizen alike. Virtually all Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and property and live in camps for most of the war, although it violated many essential constitutional rights of Japanese Americans. Yet despite this treatment, 33,000 Japanese Americans decided to join the armed services distinguishing themselves as combat interpreters in the Pacific theater and in combat in Europe.
Some of the Japanese were small business owners and many owned their own homes. As they learned that they would be uprooted from their property and belongings, many searched and found non-Japanese neighbors and friends who offered to look after their property for the durations.5
The camps were spartan at best, located in arid open areas and surrounded by barbed wire. They were made up of rows of wooden barracks with tar paper roofs which had families crammed into single rooms with steel cots and straw mattresses. Showers and toilet facilities were communal. The lack of privacy broke down family and traditional social norms. Families were referred to by numbers. The Japanese were filled with resentment for their treatment, especially those who were citizens.
1862 Japanese died while in the internment camps. Some died simply from disobeying orders and were killed by guards. The conditions of the internment camps were less than sanitary and caused sickness to be a concern across all ten camps. Extreme weather was also to blame as these camps were not well made. Often the lack of medical care available to prisoners played a role in untreated disease, mental health issues, and stress.6
In time the internees were able to construct a more livable environment and a functioning society. They published a newsletter and set up schools. They planted trees and gardens and raised livestock. All internees were to work at paying jobs, some making war supplies. Clothes left from the CCC were distributed. Stoves were installed. Stores were set up with the profits returned to residents.
Americans on the home front did not receive much coverage of the camps. They were treated to news stories portraying the camps as centers with schools and baseball fields. In farming areas the Japanese were permitted to leave the camps and work on farms which were desperate for workers. Internees were credited with saving the sugar beet crop of 1942.7 Many had been farm workers before their detention. The following is a story that tells of an encounter during that time.
by R. LaRue (b.1937):
My dad often lets me tag along as he makes his rounds of McMullen Dairy. We live on the dairy in the San Gabriel valley of Southern California. A cacophony of voices fills my memory of these adventures.
“Elgin, Elgin, come have a wee taste,” Mr. McMullen’s Scottish brogue rings out from his front porch. We climb the stairs and I watch with the curiosity of a four-year-old as the two men share a glass of wine while discussing the status of the dairy and events of the day. I know my dad’s name is Eldon and wonder why Mr. McMullen always calls him Elgin.
The house sits back among the trees of McMullen’s walnut orchard. I listen curiously to men talking in Spanish as they tend the trees.
We take our leave and walk on out to the cow pasture. Dad opens the gate and we follow the cattle down the lane to the holding pen outside the dairy barn.
The milkers take over and shout the cries of western herdsmen as they sort and move the milk strings into their respective stanchions.
Pete, the dairy operator, comes out of his house. He scoops me up, swings me around, and teases me in his Dutch accented English. He sets me down and he and my dad discuss the condition of the herd. When the cows are locked in their stanchions, Dad straps on his milking stool, sets his bucket under the first cow of his string, and the never-ending task of a dairy farm begins anew. Pete walks me back to our house and hands me over to my mom.
Mom is listening to the Hit Parade on the radio. She sends me out to play while she tends to her household chores. I approach the backyard fence and listen to the singsong voices of the orient coming from the truck farm next door. The people speaking are bent over tending their rows of plants. A pretty little girl about my age leaves the group and crosses the field toward me. She sits down across the fence from me and we play in the dirt.
My parents have tried to explain that these people are Japanese and somehow different. I don’t understand. I can see that she is darker than Pete’s redheaded granddaughter, Sharon. Her eyes are different. But she is just as fun to play with. We play with few words, but words are not needed. Still, the fence separates us. She does not come to my house and I don’t go to hers.
The afternoon wears on. A woman comes and leads the girl away. She smiles and says something that I don’t understand. I watch as they walk toward their house. The girl turns and her hand comes up in a small wave. I wave back.
Dad comes home from the afternoon milking. Mom sets out dinner and we eat. After dinner, Dad and I go to the living room while Mom cleans up the kitchen and nurses my baby brother. Dad turns on the radio.
The smooth voice of Lowell Thomas comes over the airways. He tells us the news of the day. Most of what he has to say is about the war. The war is not news to me. Like the endless routine of the dairy, it has always been there. It is a part of our lives. We don’t feel it; it is far away. But we hear about it constantly. It is like the sound of the ocean when we camp on Laguna Beach. It rumbles in the background without end.
It is an afternoon like any other. Pete hands me off to Mother. I go out the backdoor to the yard. It is strangely quiet. I can hear the strains of Glen Miller’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” playing from inside the house. But no singsong voices come from the field next door. It is deserted. The plants still stand, green and growing. But no one is taking care of them. The people are gone. I sit by the fence for a while, alone. The death-like silence wraps around me.
I go back in the house and ask my mom where the people have gone. “The Army took them away,” she tells me. She tries to explain, but her words are not enough. Not enough to quell the fear welling up inside me. The first chink in my armor of innocence has been opened.
Over the course of the war, and very quietly, the government had been relocating many of the residents to other parts of the country. When the war ended some of the remaining residents were reluctant to leave the camps for fear that the animosity toward them was still strong in California. Governor Earl Warren, later a Supreme Court Chief Justice, made extraordinary efforts to encourage local communities to accept them, many of whom were US citizens.
Much less known was the plight of Korean aliens, many of whom were citizens. Korea had been annexed by Japan and so made Koreans technically Japanese subjects and the US government classified them as Japanese. Yet Koreans had been and were still fighting against Japan through the Korean Nationalist Association.
More than 400,000 Axis prisoners were shipped to the United States and detained in camps in rural areas across the country. Some 1000 camps and hospitals were built, mainly in the South and Southwest but also in the Great Plains and Midwest. Forty-seven of forty-eight states hosted camps.
Government guidelines mandated placing the compounds away from urban, industrial areas for security purposes, in regions with mild climate to minimize construction costs, and at sites where POWs could alleviate anticipated farm labor shortages.
Other than barbed wire and watchtowers, the camps resembled standard United States or German military training sites with prisoners segregated by service branch and rank. The Geneva Convention of 1929 required the United States to provide living quarters comparable to those of its own military, which meant 40 square feet for enlisted men and 120 square feet for officers. If prisoners had to sleep in tents while their quarters were constructed, so did their guards. The three admirals and forty generals in custody were sent to Camp Clinton and Camp Shelby in Mississippi, where each had his own bungalow with a garden.8
POWs subsisted on the same rations as American soldiers. Enlisted men were permitted to buy beer in camp canteens, while officers enjoyed wine. Many POWs wrote home that they ate better in captivity than in the German army with some reporting that they had actually gained weight while in the US. The perks didn’t end there. Prisoners could appoint representatives to take part in some decision-making with their jailers or to file complaints with the camp commander. POWs were also provided recreational facilities, religious services and hobby and sports equipment, as well as theaters for plays and movies. Musical instruments, books and magazines were also supplied, as was printing equipment for the production of camp newspapers. Detainees could send and receive letters and packages, subject to approval of military censors.9
Tens of thousands of enemy prisoners were put to work in canneries and mills, on farms to harvest wheat or pick asparagus, and just about any other place they were needed and could work with minimum security. In Nebraska, near one camp, passers-by could watch POWs playing soccer while fellow prisoners cheered them on.10
German and Italian POWs were given liberty passes to visit nearby towns. Many interacted with the locals; some even became romantically attached to American girls. Ironically, in Southern states, German POWs could eat in segregated diners not open to Black Americans. Italian POWs also had great freedom with passes to dances in town (usually arranged by Italian American groups or Catholic Churches) and even weekends at the home of a sponsor.11
The interactions between these prisoners and Americans mostly proved to be friendly and even cordial in some cases. POWs dined with families on occasion and some confessed that they were glad to be prisoners and not getting shot at. Very few attempted to escape and almost all were returned. In Framingham, Massachusetts, Italian POWs from a nearby camp were used to help build a large veteran’s hospital. The Italians were excellent masons and were building the chapel. The neighborhood near the site was heavily Italian-American and the not-tightly-supervised POWs would wander away from their work to go into town. They always returned. The following is a report of an encounter.
by John B. (b.1935):
I was maybe 10 and playing out front on the sidewalk when this man wearing gray striped clothes with POW stenciled across the front came along. I was told to be afraid of them because they were soldiers who killed people in the war. He looked very sad and I wasn’t afraid. I spoke a little Italian and asked him if he ran away from his work. He said he was just taking a walk and was going right back. He said I looked like his little brother in Italy. Then Mrs LaPenta came out and told him to go back to his work and he left. I had to tell the story over and over in the neighborhood. What I’ll always remember is how sad he looked.
Of course, as all POWs are required to try, some escaped. A well-known case occurred in Arizona at the Papago Park confinement center. Twenty-five German prisoners led by Captain Jurgen Wattenberg, former commander of the submarine U-162, had miraculously managed to tunnel 180 feet under the fences out to a canal and freedom. Bad weather and bad luck doomed most of them to their quick capture, except for Captain Wattenberg. He made his mistake when questioned by a police officer who asked to see his selective service card. The captain said he had left it at home in Glendale. When further quizzed about which Glendale, he fell afoul of his lack of geography and responded, “Oh, back East.” He was quickly reincarcerated. The follow up to the story is unusual. In 1985, Captain Wattenberg and eight of his fellow former prisoners met up for a celebration with several of their former guards.12
As soon as the war ended, the US government arranged to repatriate all POWs held on American soil and elsewhere. Many requested permission to stay and even applied for citizenship. Some had been born in the US and already had citizenship but had been conscripted on trips back to Italy or Germany prior to America’s entry to the war. A few had managed to escape and survive in the larger American home front. One owned and operated a bookstore for some time before his recapture. On July 23, 1946, one prisoner, an electrician from Heidelberg, was rumored to be the last POW being repatriated. The event was deemed so newsworthy that press photographers had him walk up the ship’s gangway several times, some trips in continuous motion for the movie cameras and several trips in stop action for the still photos.13